They're still arguing the wrong topics

Why does the "God of the Gaps" argument keep coming up, when it's off topic?

One of the arguments against Intelligent Design (ID) is that it's a weak "God of the Gaps" theory. That horse won't ride, but it got trotted out again in another major paper, the Washington Post, a couple of days ago. The problem is that it's a "Straw Man" argument. They present what they say are ID's claims, and show how ridiculous they are. But they're attacking something that ID doesn't believe. When their attack succeeds, they say it has succeed against ID. In reality, they're shadow boxing, not addressing the real issues.

The "God of the Gaps" idea is this: there's a great deal we don't understand about nature. When we cannot explain something naturally, we're uncomfortable, so we resort to God as an explanation. In reality, though, we've been progressively explaining more and more of nature, and this God is shrinking before our eyes as he becomes less and less necessary to explain things. Someday, we will be able to explain so much that God will vanish--poof!--completely.

I've addressed this previously (look about halfway down the page on that post). Let's take it a little further now.

Intelligent Design is not merely "uncomfortable" with the gaps. It says some features of nature are not only unexplained, but unexplainable in principle. It's not that we haven't yet figured things out, but there are things that by their very nature could not be figured out in natural terms. If this claim is correct--and it's still out there being tested--then the purely naturalistic form of evolution fails as an explanation. We have only one other conceivable explanation, which is that life developed under the guidance of a powerful intelligence.

Additionally, let's recognize that every explanation has gaps. Evolution has horrifying gaps in the fossil evidence. For this, they invoke the invisible fossil theory (I just made that name up). It says that only a very small minority of animals would fossilize, so we don't have them all. This is most certainly true. But to conclude that those missing fossils would contain all the transitional forms is a matter of faith, not of evidence.

So who's invoking a "gaps" explanation here? We both are. We have to, after all there are gaps.

Now, is God a good explanation for the gaps? A view of science that decides a priori that every explanation must be naturalistic will have to say no. But that's assuming the conclusion; it's arguing in a circle.

J.P. Moreland shows in Christianity and the Nature of Science that science must take external conceptual problems into account. Just because a topic isn't "science," doesn't mean it doesn't matter to science. There are questions of meaning in life that evolution cannot deal with very well. There is good historical evidence that the message of Jesus Christ and the Easter events is historically true. An explanation of origins has to overlap with these things.

Posted: Thu - March 24, 2005 at 09:13 AM |

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They're still arguing the wrong topics

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson